


A midnight cry

by smaragdbird



Series: Terror Rare Pair Week [23]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Crying, Guilt, M/M, Nightmares, killing the man you love gives you nightmares who knew, though Hickey doesn't recognise it as such
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 05:08:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21470566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smaragdbird/pseuds/smaragdbird
Summary: Written for the Terror Rare Pair WeekAfter he kills Billy, the nightmares begin
Relationships: William Gibson/Cornelius Hickey
Series: Terror Rare Pair Week [23]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1542748
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16
Collections: The Terror Rarepair Week 2019





	A midnight cry

_There’s a light breeze coming from the ocean, waves gently rolling against white sand as he’s lying in the shadow of a palm tree, letting the warmth soak into his skin. Billy’s next to him, eyes the same shade of bright blue as the sky above them._

_This is paradise. He says so to Billy who gives a smile and leans over to kiss him. It’s familiar yet he cannot get enough of it. Suddenly though there is this smell, this stench like rotten meat._

_He pulls back and sees that Billy isn’t Billy anymore. He’s a corpse, chunks of flesh missing, parts of his bones exposed, the rest turned black and putrid. _

He woke up, bathed in cold sweat and reaching for his knife. But he was alone in his tent and outside everything seemed to be quiet. 

A nightmare. He had never had one before and couldn’t say that he cared for them now. Why would he have one about Billy? That made no sense

/

_They’re in Billy’s cabin. It’s daylight and it’s risky but no one should be aboard except watch, everyone else watching the football match between Erebus and Terror, and they’re kissing as if they have all the time in the world. _

_He has an order from Mr Darlington to fulfil but seeing Billy, he’s snuck into his cabin just for a few stolen kisses, nothing more. It’s nice, makes him smile sometimes just thinking about kissing Billy. _

_He’s got a hand buried in Billy’s hair and the other cupping his face, drawing out the moment for as long as possible when he feels something hot and wet slide over his hand. Tears? He pulls back, frowning, and sees that it’s not tears._

_It’s blood. Billy’s bleeding. From his eyes, his hair, his nose, his mouth, his ears. Billy opens his shirt and there are stab wounds there and more blood, trickling, streaming, torrenting down to the floor, filling the cabin which has no exit anymore. _

He woke up just before he drowned in it, gasping for air in the Arctic summer night, hand in a tight fist around his knife. He was alone. It was only a dream. There was nothing to fear.

He had done nothing wrong.

/

_Carnivale is loud and everyone’s too drunk to notice that he and Billy left for a bit and just came back. They smile at each other from across the crowd before Billy gets drawn into a drunken conversation with Peglar and Hodgson._

_He decides to take a leak and suddenly the tent is closed and there’s fire and screaming and whatever happened, it’s bad._

_“Stand back”, he yells but no one seems to hear him over the screams. He plunges his knife into the canvas and feels that there’s a body beneath but it doesn’t matter, everyone’s going to die if he doesn’t get it open._

_So he cuts and cuts and cuts and it’s Billy’s body who falls into him, slashed open the entire length of his body like a carcass in a butcher’s shop, but his eyes are open and Billy looks at him, looks at him with those blue, blue eyes and – _

He woke up from the pain and looked down at his hand. Blood was welling up on his palm. He had to have reached for his knife in his sleep and cut himself.

Wiping his hand on the blankets, he tried to get his breath under control. Why did he keep dreaming about Billy? It made no sense. Billy was dead. He had spared him a long, drawn out death full of pain. Billy would’ve understood why he had to do it.

/

_He’s been lying awake for hours, the nightmares won’t let him sleep anymore. He still doesn’t understand why. Also his stomach hurts. Billy’s been eaten so they’ve gone back to the tins for now. Soon they’ll find something else. The other camp is littering corpses and Goodsir doesn’t put up much of a fight anymore._

_Still, the tins don’t seem to have agreed with him. None of the others complained, so maybe Diggle gave him a putrid one as revenge, though it didn’t taste strange._

_He’s been tossing and turning all night but the pain won’t ease, if anything it’s getting worse. It feels as if something wants to claw its way out of him._

_Lifting his shirt, he peers down and sees something move under his skin. The sight startles him. It happens again. Something is pressing against his stomach from the inside._

_He has to get it out so he plunges his knife into his stomach and cuts and cuts so the things inside can get out. A pair of hands emerges first, covered in caulker’s tar, gripping his hipbones as leverage to pull an entire body out._

_He stares as the thing contorts itself to get out of him, head somehow leaving last when it shows it’s face, it stares back at him with Billy’s eyes. _

He woke up, clutching a hand to his stomach, but there was no pain and as he lifted his shirt, the skin was smooth, nothing beneath it but his own body. 

Why was it always Billy? Why not one of the other men he had killed? Why not one of the other men he had eaten like Fitzjames or Morfin or Irving?

Why Billy?

/

_There’s a light breeze coming from the ocean, waves gently rolling against white sand as walking along the beach, letting the warmth soak into his skin. The house is simple but large enough for all of them, him and Billy, Billy’s father, his brother, his sister and her family._

_Billy’s been unable to leave the sea behind completely when after they all left for Australia and so they’ve become fisher and business is going reasonably well. _

_Billy gets up from where he was mending nets with his father when he arrives. He’s had to go to town to get some new ingredients for the caulker’s tar so their boat doesn’t leak the next time they take it out._

_“Hello”, Billy says and kisses him, “I’ve missed you, Edmund.” _

He woke up with a cry and tears on cheeks and rolled over on his side to muffle the uncontrolled sobbing in his pillow. He had never told Billy his real name. He had never talked about his plan to stay on the Sandwich Islands.

Billy had told him about his father’s plans to emigrate to Australia, once when they had all talked about what they would do with four years’ worth of double pay once they came back. But Billy had said he wouldn’t leave the Navy, that he belonged to the sea and nowhere else.

In the end it seemed neither of them would get their wish.

**Author's Note:**

> I headcanon 'Edmund' as Hickey's real first name because of the character from Shakespeare's King Lear
> 
> "I grow; I prosper. Now, gods, stand up for bastards!"


End file.
